LIBERALISM.

A European living in 1930, or even in 1970, would certainly have been astounded to learn that liberalism had outlived the twentieth century and even begun to dominate Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first. To understand this, one must remember that Europeans experienced the period between the outbreak of World War Iin 1914 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a continual and repeated crisis of liberalism.

The history of liberalism between 1914 and the early twenty-first century is thus a rather curious one, for it is the history of a death followed by a resurrection. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the definition of liberalism varies depending on which of its several aspects is under consideration. Even putting matters at their simplest, at least five dimensions must be taken into account: judicial liberalism, according to which rights protect all the freedoms required for the unfettered development of the individual; constitutional liberalism, or political arrangements designed to prevent or limit the concentration, concealment, or abuse of power; political liberalism, in which major political parties seek to promote their doctrine among the masses; economic liberalism, which assigns priority to free enterprise; and finally, too often overlooked, the moral and cultural liberalism that preaches tolerance for diverse opinions and behavior. These different facets together form the variegated picture offered by liberalism after 1914.

POST–WORLD WAR I: LIBERALISM IN CRISIS

One thing, though, can hardly be contested: liberalism as it came into being in the nineteenth century was the first victim of World War I. So great was the war's impact that all dimensions of liberalism may be said to have been thrown into question, including the moral one, whose retreat was clearly reflected by men's increased power over women, by the new tension between the generations, and by an increased repression of abortion in the context of policies designed to boost the birthrate.

The severest blow to liberalism was of an intellectual and philosophical order. Many thoughtful Europeans in the 1920s felt that their civilization was no longer liberal in its essence. The notion of moral progress had been shattered by the military exactions deliberately visited upon civilian populations (bombing, imprisonment, expulsions). Any notion of a law-governed community of nations (droit des gens) or of a peace founded on international law had been reduced to a mockery by the war aims of the various belligerents (including the annexation of foreign territories, the economic subjugation of conquered peoples, and the forced removal of populations). Neither the draconian economic measures decreed by the Treaty of Versailles (and denounced by John Maynard Keynes), nor the League of Nations, whose actions were for the most part ineffective, could restore the idea of a European civilization.

The mass slaughter of World War I was perceived as the destruction of the very principles in whose defense that war had been waged. The institution of press censorship, the opening of the mail, and restrictions on the freedom to buy and sell, and on travel and assembly, meant that all the liberties that had hitherto defined the individual's everyday relationship to a liberal order had been curtailed or suspended; what was more, they had been abridged by states, parties, or politicians who continued to call themselves liberal. It would be fair to say, however, albeit something of a generalization, that in the wake of the war European culture, as expressed through the arts, literature, and philosophy, became antiliberal, rejecting reason and individualism and embracing violence.

It was in the economic sphere that the crisis of liberalism was most acutely felt. The great crash of 1929 is often looked upon as the catalyst of the crisis of liberal capitalism, but so far as Europe was concerned, and in terms of public perceptions, economic liberalism had already been deeply wounded by the great financial and monetary upheavals of the 1920s. For the European middle class, liberalism as it existed prior to 1914 was founded not on credit and consumption but rather on the traditional forms of rent, thrift, and inheritance. The inflation, rising prices, and currency devaluation especially rampant in countries such as Germany ruined (in both senses of the term) the bourgeois forms of wealth, revenue from which depended on stable prices and the convertibility of national currencies into gold.

For the population at large, it was faith in the "laws" of the economy that was exploded by the developments of the 1920s and 1930s. How could one continue to believe in a liberal economy governed by an invisible hand, dispensing worldwide justice and prosperity, when one's own experience included multiple currency devaluations, mass unemployment (10 to 12 percent of the active population in Great Britain in the 1920s), rife stock-market speculation, and the manifest inability of liberal governments to introduce adequate policies in response? Economic liberalism as a set of social beliefs, including the possibility of steady self-enrichment, the prospect of passing on a significant inheritance, and the presumption that it was reasonable to plan for the future, was thus critically compromised as the century proceeded. Only a new liberalism founded on consumption, credit, immediate remuneration in the form of salaries, and massive social mobility—a kind of liberalism that most continental European countries would not experience until the 1960s—would restore a collective sense of confidence in liberal capitalism.

In Great Britain, the "fall" of the Liberal Party brought much grist to the mill for those who foretold the utter demise of liberalism. The party, which had still dominated British political life at the beginning of the war, emerged from the conflict deeply divided. The Liberals were at logger-heads on almost every major issue: the acceptability of economic intervention by the state; the partition of Ireland; the type of social reforms called for; the return to the gold standard (abandoned in 1931); free trade (abandoned in 1932); and the relationship between the nation and its colonial empire. In point of fact, the Liberal Party, divided as it was between David Lloyd George and Herbert Henry Asquith, was now the third political force in the country, behind the Conservative and Labour Parties; and, despite a certain revival in the 1970s, it remained in that position for the rest of the century. Liberals experienced a comparable collapse in numerous other European countries, and often for the same reasons (Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark). Long in the majority, if not the parliamentary leadership, before 1914, liberal parties were relegated to the position of a structural minority everywhere in postwar Europe.

In France, the parties inspired by liberalism had always been split between moderate (Democratic Alliance Party) and radical republicans (Radical Party), but all tendencies had heretofore shared the same cultural attachment to economic liberalism and the same commitment to predominantly parliamentary institutions. In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, however, this common French liberal culture suffered a deep crisis: liberal politicians went so far as to criticize or reject the basic assumptions of liberalism, whether economic, as with the defense of a planned economy by the younger generation of radicals, or political, as with the call for a "strong" government overriding the parliamentary principle. By the mid-1930s, challenged on the one side by extreme right-wing leagues and on the other by powerful communist and socialist parties, French liberal republicanism had lost most of an influence that it was destined never to regain.

The Weimar Republic (1919–1933) is probably the most studied case of a general crisis of liberalism, one that combined not only a crisis of the liberal parties, a crisis in liberal institutions, and a crisis of liberal doctrine, but also arguably a crisis in liberal political mores, as moderation, the rule of law, and a public discourse governed by rational argument were challenged by rising violence, intimidation, sloganeering, and street propaganda. Both the right liberals of the Deutsche Volkspartei and the left liberals of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei were obliterated by the dual challenge of the nationalist and the Marxist parties. Though the liberals (specifically Hugo Preuss) had inspired the constitutional compromise of 1919, they drew no benefit from it; instead they were accused of treason for having accepted the Treaty of Versailles, of economic failure on account of inflation and of the currency crisis, and of political impotence as demonstrated by the instability of their ministerial cabinets. Liberalism had become the straw man of all political diatribes, be they driven by nationalist resentment or by the desire for radical social change. Cultural and artistic attitudes, themselves shot through by violence and radicalism, also hastened the crisis of liberal values. It is well worth recalling that Adolf Hitler's coming to power in January 1933 took place against the tripartite backdrop of the liberal parties' defeats, the crisis of liberal constitutionalism (as decrees and presidential ordinances replaced genuine parliamentary legislation), and the failure of intellectual and moral liberalism betokened by the triumph of violence and maximalism over rationality.

In not a few European countries that adopted neo-authoritarian regimes it was the weakness of liberalism—notably of liberal institutions, of judicial and constitutional liberalism—rather than the strength of authoritarian or fascist ideology that supplied the lever. Even the liberal democrats acknowledged this: liberalism was its own worst enemy. The image it presented in the face of a dysfunctional economy (whose crisis was only aggravated by the liberal policy of budgetary deflation), in the face of authoritarian governments, or in the face of international diplomatic crises, was one of impotence.

POST–WORLD WAR II: LIMITED APPEAL

The disfavor into which liberalism had fallen explained the ambiguous nature of the reconstruction of the so-called liberal democracies after 1945. Nazism and fascism were vanquished; the antiliberal Far Right was discredited; yet the disappearance of these rivals in no way heralded liberalism's return to grace. True, the shock caused by the revelation of Nazi crimes gave a significant fillip to liberalism as the guarantor of the basic rights of human beings. The idea that these rights must be protected by constitutions and declarations of first principles rather than abandoned to the vicissitudes of political majorities was decisively reaffirmed. Both international law (witness the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948) and national constitutional law (for example, the Federal Constitutional Tribunal created in 1951 for West Germany or the French Constitutional Council of 1958) strove, in accordance with the intellectual legacy of the eminent jurist Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), to perpetuate the rule of law (in the European sense of an État de droit or Rechtsstaat). But, broadly speaking, in the Europe of 1945, liberalism had by no means retrieved its former status as the most popular political philosophy—and certainly not in the economic and social realms.

It is sometimes suggested that the economic and social system instituted in western Europe after 1945 had liberal roots. William Beveridge is usually cited in this connection for his contribution to the British welfare state, with its major public services providing protections against the ravages of illness, unemployment, old age, and poverty; and John Maynard Keynes is credited for his economic prescriptions justifying social spending and voluntary budgetary deficits. The contribution of liberalism here should not be overestimated, however. During these early postwar years, with their emphasis on the nationalization of big business and often on economic planning, liberals, be they economists, politicians, or high civil servants, were largely relegated to the background. In fact the advent of the welfare state served only to divide European liberals once again: on the one hand were those (such as Friedrich Hayek) who were hostile to the very idea of economic and social intervention by the state, and on the other hand those who accepted a compromise with the social democrats in the shape of a "social market" economy. Where political parties calling themselves liberal still existed, they tended (except in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where they were more solid) to be small intermediate parties capable at most of adding their weight to coalitions of one kind or another, as in the cases of the German Free Democratic Party, the Italian Liberal Party, the French Centre National des Indépendants, or the Belgian Liberal Reform Party. These small liberal parties no longer represented anybody except particular minority sectors—liberal professions, artisans, small businessmen, or farmers—who had been forgotten or ignored by newly established social democratic regimes.

Liberalism did not disappear altogether between the 1940s and the 1970s, but this was due solely to its survival in an intellectual sense and to a continued niche existence within the other great political traditions. Thus liberal features were easier to recognize in the Christian social democratic movements of Alcide De Gasperi in Italy or Ludwig Erhard in Germany, with their attachment to the principles of competition and a stable currency, or even among some social democrats, than in liberal parties prone at times to drift into the politics of protest or populism, confining themselves to a critique of state bureaucracy and the social burdens imposed by fiscal inequities. Liberal attitudes on rational planning in a free market economy persisted too among high technocrats and functionaries, such as Jacques Rueff or Jean Monnet in France, or in the pressure groups of industrialists. It was as though liberalism had abandoned the political realm to other tendencies and no longer needed to engage in politics in the electoral sense.

LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY: RESURGENCE

Then came the last great surprise of the twentieth century: the almost triumphal "return" of liberalism. The economic crisis of the 1970s had the opposite effect to the antiliberal reaction of the 1930s. No longer a scapegoat, liberalism became a kind of miracle remedy.

In Great Britain, the political success of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was based on a return to the social ethic of economic liberalism. Her policies, embracing anti-inflationary measures, privatization, reduced taxation, and the economic disengagement of the state, were underpinned not only by new economic theories (monetarism and the emphasis on supply rather than demand) but above all by an appeal to the values of hard work and individual merit as opposed to what she called a "culture of dependence" produced by the welfare-state era. Thatcherist neoliberalism has been adopted, though often in considerably modified form, as the political credo of many European governments since the 1980s, among them the administrations of Jacques Chirac, Édouard Balladur, and Alain Juppé in France, Helmut Kohl in Germany, José Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. The only social features of the welfare state still defended everywhere are health services and unemployment protection—often in a reconceived version, as in Holland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark.

There was more to liberalism's rebirth, however, than the fact that it effectively addressed economic crisis. The critique of European communism and its subsequent collapse brought a new intellectual and political generation into the liberal fold. Beginning in the 1970s, broad criticism of communist regimes put the defense of basic freedoms back on the order of the day, including freedom of information, freedom of expression, and freedom to practice one's religion. Once the communist regimes were gone, an economic liberalism holding out the prospect of rapid access to the consumer society, of free enterprise, and of geographical and social mobility, exercised a pronounced power of seduction over a portion of public opinion in formerly communist countries, most of all among young people.

The construction of the European Union (EU) also had an impact on the liberal renaissance. From the outset (the Treaty of Rome of 1957), liberal principles underlay a project driven by the wish to transcend international conflicts through peaceful cooperation among states. When the institutional process of European integration resumed with the Single European Act in 1986, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the formal completion of the single market in 1993, and the introduction of the single currency in 2002, these developments paralleled the successes of neoliberal policies within member nations. And indeed liberal conceptions of free trade, deregulation, and the disengagement of the state from economic management also informed (and still inform) the main decisions taken at the European level. The progression of EU membership from fifteen to twenty-five states, including the incorporation of former communist countries, has even further strengthened the influence of economic, judicial, and philosophical liberalism within pan-European institutions.

It is therefore tempting to conclude that liberalism has experienced a perfect resuscitation, as though the beneficiary of an egregious instance of the cunning of history after the successive disappearances of the great mass ideologies of the twentieth century—nationalism, fascism, Nazism, communism, and socialism. There can be no doubt that liberalism in its economic and judicial dimensions was far more solid in the first years of the twenty-first century than it was in either 1930 or 1950. Yet there is something ambiguous about this "victory" of liberalism.

EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: DIVISIONS

In the first place, there has been no corresponding renaissance of the great liberal political parties of an earlier day, founded exclusively on the liberal credo. Strong in some senses but weak in others, liberalism is widely dispersed—discernible as easily in the British Conservative Party as among continental Social Democrats; it has no single incarnation. Precisely because of this broad, almost hegemonic presence, European liberalism is still the butt of sharp criticism from vast mass political movements. These may be of the Far Right, claiming that liberalism threatens the integrity of the nation, or of the Far Left, arguing that in its globalizing phase liberalism destroys social bonds.

Second, compared with nineteenth-century liberalism, neoliberalism seems seriously lopsided, being far more legal and economic in nature than political and constitutional. From the constitutional standpoint, in fact, liberalism is visibly in retreat: neoliberal experiments, notably in Great Britain and Italy, have been characterized by a personalized and media-driven exercise of power, a centralization of decision-making, and a marked decline in parliamentary process.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the aspect of liberalism that has perhaps made the most headway since the 1960s is the cultural and social emancipation implied by the progress of feminism, the extension of gay rights, and the transformation of the family and of mores. This kind of liberalism has nourished left-wing political culture but not that of the neoliberal Right. Left liberals are inclined to defend minority and women's rights and to embrace multiculturalism while frequently remaining opposed to economic liberalism, whereas neoliberals often ally themselves with such neoconservative demands as a return to the traditional family and the defense of moral and even religious values. Partisans of cultural liberalism are thus prone to find themselves in direct opposition to partisans of economic liberalism, so that the idea of a liberal movement that is fundamentally split is as pertinent in the early twenty-first century as it ever was.

See alsoAsquith, Herbert Henry; Beveridge, William; Keynes, J. M.; Lloyd George, David; Monnet, Jean .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aron, Raymond. An Essay on Liberty. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York, 1970. Originally published, 1965.

Burdeau, Georges. Le libéralisme. Paris, 1979.

Freeden, Michael. Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939. Oxford, U.K., 1986.

Lippmann, Walter. An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society. Boston, 1937. Reprint, as The Good Society, with an introduction by Gary Dean Best, New Brunswick, N.J., 2005.

Nicolas Roussellier